There’s a warehouse just outside Boston where the sailcloth for the USS Constitution was made in the 1700s. Today it holds about 100 humanoid robots — all named Sonny — who are busily picking things up, putting them down, and mostly failing.
But that’s the whole point.
I got inside DF1 — Data Factory One — run by Tutor Intelligence, which calls it the largest robot data collection operation in the United States. CEO Josh Gruenstein compares it to the Large Hadron Collider: a giant, expensive, purpose-built instrument designed to answer one question: Can you actually scale your way to a generally capable industrial robot?
Nobody has done it yet. Tutor’s bet is that they can be first — and their contrarian argument is that everyone else is solving the wrong problem.
“Nobody has ever successfully built robot products. People have built robotic solutions providers, for narrow end users. But what does it mean to build one robot that can do the same task for thousands of customers?” — Josh Gruenstein, CEO, Tutor Intelligence
Also in the piece: a metric you’ve probably never heard of — SKU coverage — that cuts through a lot of humanoid robotics hype better than any demo video.